We have a thread on word order of genitives but I think that a specific short discussion may be helpful on a restricted subset.

I was reading the Sermon on the Mount and wondered about the accent of ὑμῶν in the following:

ὅπως ἴδωσιν ὑμῶν τὰ καλὰ ἔργα
so that they might see your good works.

The genitive "of you" has been placed after the verb and before its head noun phrase.
(To prevent a dead-end diversion, red herring,
I do NOT read "of you" as Focal and if a Focal reading were intended the order would surely have been written as ὅπως ὑμῶν ἴδωσιν τὰ καλὰ ἔργα.)
It would appear that the pronoun has been attracted to the verb and placed after it in a "quiet spot" exactly like enclitics σου, μου κτλ. The problem is that ὑμῶν has its own accent and a perispomenon which keeps its high-tone accent, unlike words acute/grave.
My thinking is that two thousand years ago these repositioned "heavy pronouns" (pronouns that keep their accent) did not actually keep their accent. They dropped their accent like an enclitic. Stephen Carlson, are you with me on this so far?
As an enclitic they do not carry any special, single-constituent focus. One could even call them "demoted."

However, I have been respecting the artificial accentuation rules in the case of these demoted "heavy pronouns". I pronounce the pronoun with an accented syllable. Should I reverse my position?
On Focal frontings with nouns that have a final acute/grave accent I disobey the grave accent and override with an acute, on the grounds that the word is Focal.
Ex: instead of Jn 1:1 θεος Ην ο ΛΟγος, I would read as θεΟΣ Ην ο ΛΟγος . (capital letters show high tone reading.)

So, if I/we already read "Focal-words-with-grave-accents" with their underlying ACUTE, should be read non-Focal words like ὑμῶν without an accent, as if they had a grave?

I would ask if this would bother anyone listening to my reading, but that would presume that the sounds were so automatic in listeners that mis-read sounds would 'clang' in their ears. This certainly happens to me when I hear Hebrew misread, but Greek is normally read so poorly that I already need to turn off all sensitivity when listening to readings and I assume that most people have already been trained, one way or another, to "de-listen." (That does not speak well of our field, but that is a different topic.)
Here we are discussing what should optimally be done.

I had to laugh at this. Stephen Carlson may be with you but don't know about anyone else. Perhaps Mike Aubrey(sp?).

The whole idea that focus is somehow related to accentuation in Ancient Greek is something I have never considered. Perhaps that explains why I don't understand what Mike and Steve are talking about when enclitic pronouns are being discussed.

RandallButh wrote:My thinking is that two thousand years ago these repositioned "heavy pronouns" (pronouns that keep their accent) did not actually keep their accent. They dropped their accent like an enclitic. Stephen Carlson, are you with me on this so far?
As an enclitic they do not carry any special, single-constituent focus. One could even call them "demoted."

However, I have been respecting the artificial accentuation rules in the case of these demoted "heavy pronouns". I pronounce the pronoun with an accented syllable. Should I reverse my position?

I've thought a lot of about this. We don't have much direct evidence, unless we want to go back through Koine music or odd accentuation in the manuscripts that don't follow practice, so it is largely speculative. There is some evidence that the long ultima of these pronouns shorten and take a grave instead of a circumflex, e.g. ὑμῶν --> ὑμὼν or ὑμὸν.

I've wondered sometimes if these would behave like other two-syllable enclitics and either lose their accent altogether and induce an accent in the preceding word or be accented as a grave only if the preceding word is paroxytone. But I'm (ETA: not) willing to go that far since I haven't heard of evidence of the concomitant accentual changes in the preceding word and I suspect they would have been added to the list of two-syllable clitics, e.g. ἐστὶ, φησὶ. So while I think these could have a grave, they wouldn't merge tonally into the preceding word like enclitics.

RandallButh wrote:On Focal frontings with nouns that have a final acute/grave accent I disobey the grave accent and override with an acute, on the grounds that the word is Focal.
Ex: instead of Jn 1:1 θεος Ην ο ΛΟγος, I would read as θεΟΣ Ην ο ΛΟγος . (capital letters show high tone reading.)

I'm fascinated by barytone nouns. According to Devine and Stephens, the grave accent has a number of interesting effects, one of which is that it does not impose catathesis (or down-step) in the following contonation (a H*+L tone, for acute or circumflex accent), and so it can created a merged accentual domain with it. This following contonation would be at a higher tone than the grave, and I think it is more phonologically prominent and less suitable for focus. Changing the grave to acute in focus would make these behave like normal words in focus. That's probably a reasonable practice.

Note that I suspect the ἦν probably does not have a true circumflex (i.e. a high[+low] tone) as its word order tends to follow that of its unaccented counterpart in the present ἐστι.

RandallButh wrote:So, if I/we already read "Focal-words-with-grave-accents" with their underlying ACUTE, should be read non-Focal words like ὑμῶν without an accent, as if they had a grave?

Yeah, grave but not enclitic. "Without an accent" could be proclitic?

RandallButh wrote:I would ask if this would bother anyone listening to my reading, but that would presume that the sounds were so automatic in listeners that mis-read sounds would 'clang' in their ears. This certainly happens to me when I hear Hebrew misread, but Greek is normally read so poorly that I already need to turn off all sensitivity when listening to readings and I assume that most people have already been trained, one way or another, to "de-listen." (That does not speak well of our field, but that is a different topic.)
Here we are discussing what should optimally be done.

Right, but I don't think most people in the field have really heard enough Greek to have much of any training in listening, It's like Americans pronouncing Russian.

Last edited by Stephen Carlson on November 6th, 2014, 7:09 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Reason:Fixed typo that affects sense.

Well, if we don't put 'of you' on the enclitic list, then I suppose that I will have to make the 'quiet spot' a regular feature of pragmatics in Greek.
Then I can have enclitics attracted to the quiet spot as well as highly presupposed information. We wouldn't need to 'cliticize 'of you'.

(BTW, I consider the accent rules an artificial systemazation rather than the way everybody spoke Koine.)

One might add that these examples of 'quiet spot' αὐτοῦ may represent a more polished Greek on the part of the eclectic text (Alexandrian).

One item where I may be difering from Devine and Stephens is that I read the grave accented words as part of a phrase with the following word/s and as if there were no accent on the word at all. In other words i read grave as a written reminder of where the accent belongs when the word 'stands still' , the grave marks a 'potential' accent that only appears in pause as it were, or 'in Focus' in my readings. Yes, I admit that this is all speculative, because the overall accentual system seems to be imposed from rules and without any nuance of context. We can also account for aytoy and ymwn being left out of enclitic lists because they had perspvmenos accents and they by rule were not allowed in the enclitic list. On HN, too, I would say that it moves pragmatically just like ESTiN, regardless of its perispvmenos accent.

On texts and papyrii with υμων and υμον I read them as simple Koine pronunciation where ω an ο are pronounced the same.

RandallButh wrote:One item where I may be difering from Devine and Stephens is that I read the grave accented words as part of a phrase with the following word/s and as if there were no accent on the word at all.

That's fairly close to how I read Devine and Stephens. But I've only read them like three times and I feel I still need a few more detailed readings to really grok what they are talking about.